the last book I read

The Name Of The Rose by Umberto Eco.

Join me if you will for a journey to the wild and lawless world of 1327, where bands of rogue monks roamed the land, a-theoligisin' and a-quibblin' over minor points of biblibal interpretation, and occasionally a-disagreein' to such an extent that they had no way of a-resolvin' the argument other than for one side to set the other on fire a bit until they shut up.

Into this hive of scum and villainy one monk, William Baskerville, walks alone - a maverick monk, who doesn't play by the book, but God dammit he gets results. Dammit, chief, if I haven't cracked the case by vespers the senior abbot can have my badge! Dammit, Baskerville, you're too close to this one - you're off the case! Go and investigate those potato thefts from the lower kitchen.

I'm not sure I can keep this up for a whole review, to be honest, so let's start again. It's 1327, during the period (1309-1377) when the Catholic popes resided in Avignon rather than Rome. As part of the ongoing theological wranglings over this situation, the aforementioned maverick monk William Baskerville and his young sidekick Adso travel to a monastery in northern Italy to attend some formal discussion about Biblical interpretation, which would of course seem laughably trivial were it not for the distinct possibility of occupying the wrong side of the argument getting you taken outside and set on fire. William is particularly at risk in this area as he is a big fan of the newfangled empiricism and critical thinking as expounded by Roger Bacon and William of Ockham, ideas some would feel were dangerously inimical to religion (and they would of course have been right).

Anyway, other matters soon arise to occupy the monks - one of them is found dead, having apparently thrown himself out of a window in the monastery's library, access to which is jealously guarded, lest dangerously subversive texts should be seen by those not well-enough versed in sophisticated theological ignoring of reality to be immune to them. Hot on the heels of that, and amid lurid rumours of some hot forbidden monk-on-monk action, another monk is found upended in a vat of pig's blood, another is found drowned in the bath-house, another has his head caved in with a religious ornament and another keels over in the prayer-stalls, apparently poisoned.

William's awesome powers of deduction eventually enable him to crack the secret code that leads to some hidden rooms within the labyrinthine library, the solution to the mystery and the person behind the killings. After a classic let-me-explain-my-evil-plan manoeuvre followed by a textbook you'll-never-take-me-alive gambit the whole library, and subsequently the whole monastery, ends up going up in flames, with the book that was the key MacGuffin consumed as well.

A 500-page book, large sections of which are devoted to descriptions of the machinations of corrupt 14th-century religious types and arcane disagreements over scriptural interpretation, even while interspersed with monks being offed in entertainingly lurid ways, won't be for everyone, especially as the aforementioned MacGuffin - the legendary lost second volume of Aristotle's Poetics, supposedly a scholarly study of comedy, which the (admittedly insane) antagonist thinks is going to destroy religion by making people laugh at it, is a bit on the disappointing side after all the build-up. And William's theory that this is all some sort of hugely complex serial-killing spree based on the book of Revelation turns out to be a great deal more coherent and interesting than the actual explanation. No doubt that's all part of Eco's fabulously post-modern plan, though. The book is supposedly chock-full of literary allusions and puns, the odd one or two of which I spotted, most obviously that William of Baskerville is basically Sherlock Holmes in a habit.

It's all much more fun than a novel about 14th-century monks has any right to be, though. I haven't seen the 1986 film, though that didn't stop me visualising William as Sean Connery throughout. I can only assume that the film omitted much of the theological discussion, or it would have been about eight hours long.

The Name Of The Rose won, in addition to most of the significant Italian literary awards, the Prix Médicis étranger in 1982, which means it qualifies as an addition to the list here.

he's having a go at the flowers now!

Couple of good examples of religious nuttery this week - more specifically the unthinking assumption that people are going to defer to your barking views just because they are long-standing enough to have acquired some public figure in a disastrous hat who's officially employed to try to make them sound respectable.

Anyway, let's start with Ricky Gervais. Now while I salute Gervais for being a high-profile atheist, I am by no means an uncritical fan of his stuff. While The Office was a work of genius, and Extras had its moments (the moments featuring Kate Winslet in particular, plus of course this bit), and the Ricky Gervais Show in its various formats has its moments too (though I'm not as convinced as Gervais seems to be that Karl Pilkington is a creation of comedic genius), I think he's probably jumped the shark comedically, certainly if Life's Too Short was anything to go by. The old argument that "I'm not promoting these views, I'm satirising them" is the same one made by Johnny Speight about Alf Garnett, after all, and there were those who weren't totally convinced by it. And his deeply unconvincing "blimey, I had no idea it meant that" reaction over the whole "mong" episode was a bit shit, really. None of this is particularly relevant here except to make the point that I certainly don't deem him to be immune from criticism. But the title of this week's Daily Mail article should give you pause for thought:

Now then: one of these things is not like the others. One of these things just doesn't belong. One of these things....OK, I'll stop now. But you get the general idea; the point is that dwarves....exist. Disabled people....exist. Whereas God....well, you know what I think, but all but the most fire-and-brimstone (funda)mentalist would agree that there's some room for debate on the subject. This bit is quite interesting too:

'Some people are offended by mixed marriage. Some people are offended by equality. Do you know what I mean?’  This straw-man defence, equating his critics with reactionary bigots, isn’t uttered in anger. Gervais is enjoying the banter. But I think it gets to the nub of what he’s about.

Couple of things here: firstly that's not what a straw-man argument is; a straw-man argument would require him to attribute to his critics views they don't actually hold, whereas that is actually a pretty accurate summary of their position. Secondly, what's wrong with equating those who oppose mixed marriage with reactionary bigots? They are reactionary bigots.

Also of interest is the story of the German court that decided that male circumcision done at the parents' behest for religious reasons amounted to "bodily harm". Now this doesn't equate to the passing of a law against it, and the ruling seems to be "not binding" in some rather woolly way, but as the setting of a precedent it's certainly a welcome step.

Say what you like about the Germans - their strange taste in shorts, being a bit too good at penalty shoot-outs (and football in general), that whole starting two world wars thing, centuries of anti-Semitism, David Hasselhoff - but they do generally take a commendably robust attitude to not giving nonsense special treatment just because it happens to be religious nonsense, the obvious other example being their no-bullshit approach to Scientology, which is after all pretty much 100% concentrated bullshit.

celebrity jeremylikey of the day

Shouty TV host and lowest-common-denominator chav-baiting shitehawk Jeremy Kyle, and star of various big-budget blockbusters including Bourne Legacy and Avengers Assemble Jeremy Renner. The big comic-book adaptation stuff leaves me pretty cold, I suspect largely because I'm not a comic-book buff in the first place, but it would be remiss of me not to point out that Avengers Assemble features the fabulously sexy Scarlett Johansson in a rubber catsuit, not to mention kicking a certain amount of ass while wearing a cocktail dress and shackled to a chair.

what's that vor?

Just a couple of additions to the previous list of stuff:

• The landmark innocuously marked as "beacon" on Ordnance Survey maps of the area just half a kilometre or so south-west of the little village of Rhosycaerau and easily visible from the coast path (from where the photograph above was taken) is in fact the Strumble Head VOR, a vital navigation landmark for trans-Atlantic aircraft and colloquially known as Green 1 among aviation enthusiasts who like to sound knowledgeable about this sort of thing. 
• More importantly, pubs: we went to two worthy of note during our holiday - The Sloop in Porthgain and the Farmers Arms in Mathry, both of which offer good honest pub grub to eat and excellent Felinfoel Double Dragon to drink. I nominate The Sloop if you must go to only one of them, just because of its coastal location and the interesting industrial history dotted around nearby.

if it ain't pembroke don't fix it

Here's a few snippets of potential interest to accompany my photographs of our trip to Pembrokeshire last week - be warned that the photo gallery contains an unnecessarily large number of photos of my beautiful baby daughter being impossibly cute and adorable in a variety of ways, for which I make no apology whatsoever.

• We stayed at a cottage at Treseissyllt Hafod, which is available for hire via the Pembrokeshire Coastal Cottages website. Plenty of accommodation space, nice gravelled courtyard area for parking and barbecues, huuuuge kitchen, all very nice.
• Just down the coast are the interesting beaches of Abermawr and Aberbach, both of which were presumably at one time your basic bog-standard little tidal harbours with estuarial mud-flats and the like, but following an enormous storm in 1859 (on the 25th of October, to be precise) now have high shingle banks shielding the area behind the beach from the tides, and as a consequence the protected areas are now little marshy nature reserves teeming with plant life and no doubt all sorts of fascinating creepy-crawlies as well.
• In addition to all this Abermawr has a surprisingly rich industrial history, particularly for a place relatively inaccessible by road. Not only was it the landfall point for an early pair of undersea telegraph cables between Britain and Ireland, but it was for a while intended to be the terminus of Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Great Western Railway (this eventually ended up being at Neyland, further south - the branch up to Fishguard was added later). There seems to be some dispute over how much preparatory work was actually done at Abermawr, but supposedly there are some earthworks which you can find if you take a walk in the woods in the south-west corner of the beach. We didn't really have time to do this, though.
• An interesting feature of Pembrokeshire (and some bits of Carmarthenshire) is the historic enclave of cultural and linguistic (and possibly genetic) Englishness that exists in its south-west corner. This is colloquially known as Little England beyond Wales and its border known as the Landsker Line. This is 15-20 miles south of where we were staying, and is illustrated quite nicely by this map (from the excellent Strange Maps) of the distribution of Welsh speakers in Wales.
• That is indeed a Buff that Nia is wearing in the photo - baby-sized Buffs are available in a variety of colours and designs. My advice is to go for the pirate bandana configuration (which is what Nia is sporting) as this offers maximum size adjustability for small heads.

what a tangled Webb we weave

Just a quick post-US Open round-up:

The eventual winner, Webb Simpson, in addition to being a dead ringer for Owen Wilson, provides an unprecedented second consecutive example (after Bubba Watson at the Masters) of a major winner being a namesake of an earlier winner of the same major championship, the earlier winner in this case being Scott Simpson in 1987. Interestingly, both Simpsons won their championships at the same course. This isn't unprecedented, as a lot of the various Morrises and Parks in the early days of the Open Championship won their titles on the same course (Prestwick, mostly), and of course Bubba Watson and Tom Watson won their Green Jackets on the same course, though that doesn't really count since the Masters is played on the same course every year.

Simpson also provides a second consecutive example of a major championship winner being a tedious God-botherer - I can't find any video clips of his full winner's speech (though there are several of the moment when he got interrupted by some drunk bloke in a Union Jack hat) but this article provides a couple of quotes, notably this one:

I probably prayed more on the last three holes than I've ever done in my life, and that kept me calm and got me home in 2 under.

So God, in additon to all that prurient spying on people wanking, takes a personal interest in the outcome of golf tournaments, and indeed personally intervenes in their outcome, though always sufficiently subtly to be undetectable - the ball being borne aloft on a little silver cloud by a choir of warbling cherubim and moved in a mysterious way to the hole while the clouds part and a big booming voice intones YOU DA MAN, WEBB would be a bit of a giveaway, presumably. But what if Webb and Bubba came up against each other in a play-off? Or would it be more of a pray-off? Eh? Eh? How would God know who to help out? Whoever had done the least wanking that week, I suppose.

Anyway, Simpson's Goddy tendencies are well-known - he's got a freakin' degree in religion, for goodness' sake - and the UK media's reaction to this provides an interesting contrast with the US one. Check out BBC commentator Andrew Cotter's tweet in the immediate aftermath of the win:

Now I think that's pretty funny, but that level of flippancy and irreverence from a professional journalist in relation to religion simply wouldn't fly in the US, an attitude of uncritical reverence to nonsensical voodoo bullshit being pretty much compulsory.

Note that the USA Today article I linked to earlier contains some textbook use of the word "clutch" in its usual golfing context as well.

look at that man commentary his words

Latest missive from the strange planet on which Tiger Woods' ex-coach and current Sky Sports summariser Butch Harmon lives - a planet where they speak a language almost, but not quite, entirely unlike English. This is his reaction to an excellent recovery from sand by young amateur prodigy Beau Hossler during the early stages of round 3 of the US Open yesterday:

LOOK AT THAT! LOOK AT THAT YOUNG MAN GOLF HIS BALLS! GO AHEAD ON YOUNG MAN! HAVE A GOOD TIME!

Nurse! Time for Mr. Harmon's medication.

that's celsius 232.78 in new money

A quick post to commemorate the death of Ray Bradbury, who died a couple of days ago aged 91. I have to confess Bradbury falls into that category of people entitled People You Are Surprised To Find Are Still Alive, or rather a closely related category entitled People You Are Surprised To Find Were Still Alive Until Very Recently On Reading Their Obituary. Listening to the Today programme this morning reminded me that another member of the first category is Bradbury's fellow science-fiction author Brian Aldiss, not much younger than Bradbury at 86, who they wheeled out for a few complimentary reminiscences.

As it happens I've read a great deal more of Aldiss' work than I have of Bradbury's - all I've read of Bradbury's work are various short stories (the medium in which he mostly worked) including those in my ancient Penguin paperback collection The Day It Rained Forever, and the classic novel Fahrenheit 451, which everyone who aspires to being a fully rounded human being should read. In many ways Fahrenheit 451 occupies the same sort of niche in Bradbury's output as The Man In The High Castle occupies in Philip K. Dick's, i.e. a slightly uncharacteristic downbeat dystopian political satire among all the wild fantastical stuff in the other books, though it must be said on comparing the two that it's (entirely typically of both men) a great deal clearer what Bradbury was on about.

Fahrenheit 451 was filmed in 1966 starring the lovely Julie Christie among others - I've never seen that one, but I do have a bit of a soft spot for the 1969 Rod Steiger film The Illustrated Man, based on a couple of Bradbury short stories from the collection of the same name.

bee gee are eye pee

I was never a particular fan of the Bee Gees, so all I'll say in the aftermath of Robin Gibb's death this week is that it was Robin who sang on most of the hits they had at what I consider to be the more interesting end of their career, the late 1960s, on songs like New York Mining Disaster 1941 and Massachusetts. That first clip segues into To Love Somebody, on which Barry sings - note that he's singing in a pretty normal voice here compared to what I once read described (aptly, I think) as the "monstrous braying falsetto" he sported once he'd taken over lead vocal duties for most of their mid- to late-1970s hits.

It seems that the association with disco eventually became a source of irritation to the Bee Gees, especially when the craze wore off and its demise took their hits and record sales down the toilet with it. In the interviews I saw and read with them over the years (of which the notorious Clive Anderson one was just the most extreme example) they always came across as charmless, humourless (about, among other things, being ripe for parody) and generally bitter about not being taken as seriously as the Lennons & McCartneys they aspired to being ranked with. All of which seems a bit churlish when set against the lavish lifestyle, yachts and top-quality orthodontics that their success afforded them.

Finally, two random observations connected to Diana Ross's 1985 hit single Chain Reaction, which the Bee Gees wrote for her. Firstly that they seemingly re-used the exact same backing track, bar at most the odd chord here and there, for their own 1991 hit Secret Love (try singing Chain Reaction over the top of it - easy, isn't it?); secondly, a close examination of the lyrics to Chain Reaction reveal it to be one of the most sexually explicit songs ever written (or ever to be number 1, anyway). Check this out:

You make me tremble when your hand moves lower
You taste a little then you swallow slower
Nature has a way of yielding treasure
Pleasure made for you, oh

[...]

You let me hold you for the first explosion
We get a picture of our love in motion
My arms will cover, my lips will smother you
With no more left to say 

Utter filth.

a new slant on old sounds

So there I was bemoaning the handful of outsize CDs I own which necessitate a sub-optimal use of rack space, little realising that my next CD purchase would increase the size of the problem by a whopping 75%.

These are the long-awaited remastered versions of My Bloody Valentine's only two studio albums Isn't Anything and Loveless, as well as a double-CD collection of non-album tracks from various singles and EPs as well as a few unreleased rarities.

No great surprises with either of the regular albums beyond a bit of tidying up and sharpening of the sound, though the Loveless re-release does comprise 2 CDs, each remastered from a slightly different master tape, but to my untrained ear pretty much indistinguishable from each other. Still, handy to have a spare one if one gets lost or broken, I suppose.

The EPs and Rarities album is a bit lumpy, as these things often are, but includes a lot of good stuff, including the full 10-minute version of Glider, which, depending on your point of view, is either unlistenable headfucking noise or a glorious hypnotic wash of grinding interstellar spaceship rumble. I tend to the latter view, while my wife tends to the former, judging by the rather unfavourable review it got when I played it earlier. Bloody hell, what's that racket, that sort of thing.

Anyway, to recap: Loveless, one of the great albums of the '90s, or any other decade come to that, buy it. By all means buy the other two as well if you like; I did.

ultrasonic the hedgehog

Here's today's mystery object. So, granny and eldest dog only - what's this?

Actually this one is fairly easy, but I include it just to add to the catalogue of stuff that our predecessors left lying around. It's plugged into the wall socket under the kitchen table, has various flashy lights on it and if you shot it from the right angle would probably bear a startling resemblance to the Millennium Falcon, though whether it could do the Kessel run in less than 20 parsecs I wouldn't like to say.

It also bears the model number LP22 on the back, which enables it to be Googled, and just as I suspected it turns out to be a sort of ultrasonic pest-scarer, which is allegedly good for deterring all sorts including mice, rats, cockroaches, ants and squirrels, while having (again, allegedly) no effect on cats, dogs or fish. I'm always slightly sceptical about these claims of extreme selectivity, just as I am when similar claims are made about things like weedkillers that won't affect your begonias, but it being in and constantly switched on (and having been since we moved in) presents me with a dilemma similar to that faced by anyone sceptical about the effectiveness of my tiger-repellent underpants. Yes, it sounds a bit implausible, but then again I've never been attacked by a tiger while wearing them.

So while I could try switching it off and removing it, there is the faint possibility that if I did so I would come downstairs the next morning to find the kitchen waist-deep in woodlice and squirrels, all really pissed off that I'd been giving them a constant blinding headache for the last two years. Perhaps I'll leave it where it is for the moment.

the world is just a GREAT BIG ONION

For someone who regularly bemoans the state of "proper" science programming on radio and TV it should go without saying that I welcome the regular Radio 4 post-9am slot featuring Jim Al-Khalili's The Life Scientific. And indeed it does go without saying, but that doesn't mean that the content is therefore immune from criticism. And yesterday's programme demonstrates this principle quite nicely, as the guest whose life was being examined was James Lovelock - a proper scientist in his youth, to be sure (his invention of the electron capture device is well-documented, his supposed invention of the microwave oven less so), but principally famous since the 1970s for the Gaia hypothesis, a - being charitable - somewhat woolly piece of quasi-religious New Age flummery that he's been touting round the world for the last 40 years and getting all frustrated when the scientific community doesn't rally round to line up behind it.

The Gaia thing is another example of how pervasive magical and religious thinking is, and how it generally rots the brain. The notion of considering the Earth as if it were a single organism, and thus able to cope, as we are, with a spot of indigestion or a minor stab wound to the leg, is an interesting and potentially useful metaphor, but it is just that, a metaphor. Once you start touting it as your actual science then you need to be a lot more specific about what claims you are making, and answer awkward questions like:

• so are you saying that the Earth has some sort of guiding intelligence that's intervening to keep things in order? If you are, what exactly are its properties? Where is the physical seat of this intelligence? How would we test for its existence or non-existence? How would you know if you were wrong?
• if you're not saying that, then what you're really saying is whoah, dude, we breathe oxygen, right, and there's, like, just the right amount of oxygen in the air, yeah? Isn't that all just A Little Bit Too Convenient (significant look to camera, raised eyebrow), eh? That's really just a small-scale Earth-centric version of the anthropic principle, which, apart from being very silly, is also really just a restatement of the "guiding intelligence" option above with some of the details hidden to make it less obviously goddy.
• if you're not even saying that, then you're really just saying that a lot of the earth's systems (biological, meteorological, seismological, systematic, hydromatic, ultramatic, etc.) have, via various interactive feedback mechanisms that we perhaps don't fully understand, fallen into a sort of equilibrium with each other. To which the answer is: well, yeah. And?

So basically you are saying either a) something clearly false, b) something clearly false or c) nothing.

One of the ways in which the Gaia thing closely resembles religion is the insistence on it all being real when talking to an uncritically accepting audience, but backtracking into "well, that bit's just a metaphor" when subjected to pointed questioning about any of it. That's exactly what, for instance, Christian types do when pinned down on any of the specifics in the Bible.

One of the other problems with this sort of hippyish Mother Earth thing is a kind of blithe assumption that It'll All Be All Right no matter what we do - plainly this has not been the case in the past (without any need for human intervention) so it's potentially a recipe for dangerous apathy and inaction in regard to things like man-made climate change. To his credit Lovelock is pretty solid about the reality of climate change, though his ideas on what to do about it are more controversial - he's a big proponent of nuclear power as the solution to the fossil fuel crisis and climate change. Now there's nothing especially cranky about that per se, though there's plenty of room for disagreement, but his blithe lack of concern about the dangers is a bit odd. Anyone who can handwave away the Fukushima disaster but insist that wind-farms are potentially lethal because if there was an earthquake the turbines might fall on someone and squash them needs to stop and have a bit of a think about what they're saying.

Oddly, one of Lovelock's big supporters during the 1970s was the late Lynn Margulis, another scientist who combined great work in some spheres with utter crackpottery in others. It's a very salutary lesson that no-one is immune from blind spots and irrationality, even those who do great things in other areas. Further examples include Isaac Newton's enthusiasm for alchemy and Linus Pauling's nuttery regarding vitamin megadoses.

So am I saying that Jim Al-Khalili and his team should have passed up the opportunity of featuring Lovelock, a man whose name is - for whatever reason - better-known than most of the people featured on the show? On the whole, no, I don't think I am saying that, and equally I understand the general desire not to editorialise and just to let the guests speak, particularly given the constraints of a 30-minute slot, but I think a slightly less uncritical tone could have been taken while still stopping short of cackling laughter and shouting WOOP WOOP NUTTER ALERT over what Lovelock was saying. I mean, that's what I would have been doing, but then again that's why I haven't got my own Radio 4 show. Yet.

the last book I read

Choke by Chuck Palahniuk.

Victor Mancini has a few issues. One, he's a sex addict, and a regular attendee at a twelve-step programme to try to combat his addiction, though his commitment to the cause is occasionally compromised by anonymous quickies in the toilets with fellow attendees. Second, his mother is in hospital with a terminal illness and he has to find the money for her medical bills, which he does in a combination of ways - through the more orthodox means of getting a job at a historical re-enactment theme park, but also through the slightly less orthodox means of faking a series of choking accidents at various restaurants and having members of the public "rescue" him by giving him the Heimlich manoeuvre; these "heroes", having now invested some emotional capital in Victor's welfare, can then be persuaded to hand over money later.

We learn a bit about Victor's past - taken into care at a fairly early age, he was passed around a series of foster parents and subject to a series of increasingly eccentric "rescues" by his mother, after which they would travel around together while she attempted to impart vital (and increasingly barking) wisdom to Victor before the authorities caught up with them again. Now his mother is in a seemingly terminal decline, and the only hope seems to be being offered by the foxy Dr. Paige Marshall, who has some treatment ideas that seem, well, unconventional to say the least. For instance, one of them involves Victor impregnating her on the altar in the hospital chapel, aborting the foetus and then using the genetically suitable stem cells thus acquired to do some sort of brain graft. Well, it might work.

So anyway, Victor's best buddy and fellow theme park employee Denny gets himself fired and then embarks on the sisyphean task of collecting up random bits of rock from around the city and cementing them into some giant structure (to remarkably little protest from whoever owns the bit of land they're doing it on), Denny and Victor become minor TV celebrities, Paige Marshall turns out not to be who she says she is, Victor's mother dies, Victor is arrested (in connection with her death) and then released and all ends - sort of - happily.

So we've all seen Fight Club, right? Well, that was Palahniuk's first novel - Choke was his fourth, published in 2001. It's highly reminiscent of the work of some other American authors of similar vintage - Douglas Coupland, Rick Moody, Dave Eggers - though it's probably less subtle and more gleefully transgressive than any of them. I'd also have to say it's probably not as good as, for instance, Moody's Purple America or Coupland's Miss Wyoming, both of which explore broadly similar subject matter (celebrity, relentless prescription drug use, joyless desultory sex, tortured parental relationships, general ennui). A bit like Platform, though, the relentless energy is all very bracing, though it's a bit too much like being poked in the eye to be completely pleasurable.

Choke was made into a film in 2008 starring the excellent Sam Rockwell among others - here's the trailer.

randomly generated music list of the day

Today's random music list is generated from the aftermath of the assembly of my new wall-mounted CD racks.

First things first: these are Lerberg CD/DVD racks from IKEA, a snip at £5 a pop. Each rack holds about 80 CDs; we have quite a lot so there are ten arranged in two columns of five on our spare room wall. Now just as with books once you start owning more than a few CDs you need a system whereby you can find the one you want, so these are alphabetised, with the exception of all the random compilations which are just randomly bunged on the bottom shelf. Anyway, the list is generated from those CDs which turn out to be of non-standard height thanks to some limited-edition packaging and (slightly unsatisfactorily in terms of rack space usage) therefore have to be slotted in on a diagonal. They're ringed in yellow in the picture and they are (in alphabetical order, naturally):

• Helplessness Blues by Fleet Foxes. A bit like Midlake's second album, this is a bit of a "grower" in comparison with its predecessor - there's nothing as joyously melodic as White Winter Hymnal or Tiger Mountain Peasant Song here. It's still great though.
• Here Comes That Weird Chill by the Mark Lanegan Band. This is the mini-album released in advance of Bubblegum in 2004. If you are perverse enough only to want one of them then Bubblegum is the one to have (Methamphetamine Blues is the only song they have in common), but really you ought to have both.
• I Might Be Wrong by Radiohead. This is the live album they released after the pair of "challenging" albums (Kid A and Amnesiac) with which they'd attempted to scare off anyone who'd wandered in after buying The Bends and OK Computer and was starting to get comfortable. Actually the slightly more rocky arrangements some of the songs require to come across in a live setting suits them quite well, and Radiohead are not a band much given to note-for-note retreads of the studio material anyway, so this is more interesting than most live albums, many of which can be a bit perfunctory. And it includes the previously unreleased gem True Love Waits.
• Takk by Sigur Rós. Better known as "the one with Hoppípolla on it". Now there's an argument that most of Sigur Rós' albums sound pretty much the same, an argument that I wouldn't necessarily argue too much with. The corollary of that is that you can have pretty much any album you like; if you are looking for a recommendation though I'd say their untitled 2002 album (featuring 7 untitled songs, helpfully) is probably the best one.

clutch ado about nothing

While trawling around the web looking for reactions to Levon Helm's death I came across a post on Jerry Coyne's excellent website Why Evolution Is True saying pretty much the usual stuff - i.e. The Band were great, he was great, shame he's dead, here's some clips - but also reproducing a section of the lengthy New York Times obituary I linked to. Here's the relevant bit:

In the Band, lead vocals changed from song to song and sometimes within songs, and harmonies were elaborately communal. But particularly when lyrics turned to myths and tall tales of the American South — like “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” “Ophelia” and “Rag Mama Rag” — the lead went to Mr. Helm, with his Arkansas twang and a voice that could sound desperate, ornery and amused at the same time. 

The word "ornery" is a bit of a mystery to non-Americans, I think. Anyone who reads a lot will have seen it used and have a vague idea of what it means - awkward, intransigent, bad-tempered - but I suspect no-one outside of North America would ever use it in spoken or written English. It's probably possible to be more specific than that, in fact, as it seems to be to be a rural middle-America good-old-boy sort of word, i.e. not something you'd ever hear the east coast urban sophisticates using. I suspect most non-American English speakers who heard it used in conversation (particularly by someone with a strong American accent) would think that they'd just misheard the word "ordinary" and be slightly puzzled by the context. It turns out that you wouldn't be entirely wrong, as it happens, since "ornery" is a 19th-century contraction of "ordinary", although the meanings have diverged quite a bit since then.

Another strange thing that struck me while watching Sky Sports' PGA tour golf coverage, including of course the Masters, is the use of the word "clutch" to describe the holing of putts under pressure, as in these two articles describing recent tournament wins by Mark Wilson and Luke Donald. These two articles take the definition somewhat more loosely and use it to describe putts that are a) on the 18th green for tournament wins and b) fairly long. In my mind that's not what "clutch putt" really means - I see them as the sort of putts from 10-12 feet and in that you have to hole reliably on the back nine on Sundays to win golf tournaments, and that Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus used to knock in as regular as clockwork.

"Clutch" as an adjective is used (though less often) in sports other than golf, though, like "ornery", overwhelmingly by people in North America. Here's a few headlines relating to basketball, American football and motor racing. No-one seems to have much of an idea where the usage originates from.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Current World Snooker Championship quarter-finalist, devoted family man and (I've just decided) Welshman Of The Day (you see what I did there) Ryan Day, and shape-shifting gelatinous alien blob and head of Deep Space Nine security Odo. It's the slightly blank expression and the weirdly sunken eyes, I think.

incidental music spot of the day

End by The Cure (from their 1992 album Wish) on the BBC's documentary Rowing The Arctic last night. If you happen to click on that iPlayer link while it's still active, it's from about 41:35 for 20 seconds or so and then another minute or so after that behind Mark Beaumont's commentary.

I was never the biggest fan of The Cure, as in general I have a bit of a problem with Goth miserablism, in that instead of it tearing at my very soul in the prescribed manner I tend just to find it hilarious. They have been around pretty much for ever, though, so there's a good chance of the odd good tune popping up here and there, and End is a cracking one which probably appeals to me more than most of The Cure's output because it features relatively little of Robert Smith's voice and lots and lots of guitars. I exempt Love Cats and Friday I'm In Love from any of this criticism, as obviously everybody loves those. Here's a live version of End from the Paris Live8 concert in 2005, with bonus Spanish subtitles.

As for the actual non-musical content of the documentary I have to simultaneously salute the courage and endurance of the people involved and admit to some slight irritation with the increasingly contrived nature of these stunts. I guess on a planet of finite size most of the obvious firsts have already been taken, you know, the North and South Poles, Everest, that sort of thing, so now people have to come up with variations on the basic themes - solo to the Pole, up Everest without oxygen, across the Andes by frog, that sort of thing. And in every case they now have to take a camera crew (or at least a digital camcorder) with them to record the whole thing for the subsequent documentary film, with coffee-table book and souvenir beermat tie-ins. I accept that this is how these trips get funded these days, but still. And there's something a bit grating about someone who's chosen, of their own free will, to ascend Kilimanjaro by spacehopper while blindfolded doing a tearful piece to camera saying "this is so hard, I don't know if I can do it": well, you chose to impose these ridiculous conditions on yourself, so, basically, shut it.

And one has to observe that even with the somewhat contrived definition of "pole" being used here (the conveniently southerly 1996 location of the magnetic North pole) the expedition failed according to its own terms, since they had to drag the boat 3 miles over ice to reach their destination. Not that I'm, you know, having a pop or anything.

deity or no deity

Today's crackpot theory is one I came up with after a couple of weeks off work on paternity leave. Now obviously parenthood is the best thing ever, but there's no doubt that it does restrict your opportunities for, say, just wandering off down the shops or up a mountain for a few hours if the fancy takes you. So one of the things you end up doing, while trying to keep a small person fed and warm and entertained and, well, alive, is watch a substantial amount of daytime TV.

You have to be a bit careful, obviously you don't want to accidentally end up watching Loose Women or, worse, have your eyes fall upon the unguarded portal to Hades aka That Which Once Seen Can Never Be Unseen, or, as it's known in the TV listings, The Jeremy Kyle Show. In general you're better off finding one of the free channels which just re-run old game shows on a constant loop - Challenge is a good one as it has re-runs of old episodes of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? as well as Alexander Armstrong's Pointless, which I rather like as it appeals to the nerdy trivia-obsessed pedant in me.

You can also, with a bit of judicious channel-hopping, spend most of the day watching re-runs of Deal Or No Deal, and here's where this post starts to coalesce into something resembling a point. It's about religion, almost inevitably, so feel free to sigh heavily and stop reading now, if you like.

One of the standard arguments that religious adherents trot out when they get involved in an argument with an atheist goes something like this: well, religion has persisted in the human psyche for thousands and thousands of years, hasn't it? So therefore, by your own argument, Mr. Evolution, it must be of some use to us, mustn't it? Therefore it must be true. Aha, checkmate, etc.

Now of course the "therefore it must be true" bit is clearly bollocks, and easily demonstrated as such by pointing out the huge range of mutually contradictory religious worldviews that exist, but there's some interesting mileage, from a purely anthropological perspective, in examining why this sort of stuff is so persistent, since it clearly is.

The most persuasive explanation I've ever read goes something like this: once early man stopped swinging around in trees eating bananas and generally just roaming about wherever he pleased hunting and gathering as he went and started doing things that required him to stick around in one place, like building proper dwellings or planting crops, little communities of people started to aggregate and we developed into a properly social species. One of the side-effects of many little communities with their own patches of land is an inevitable competition for resources, and therefore conflict between communities. So there's a great deal of utility in being able to know who is "one of us" and who is an "outsider" quickly and easily. This is trivial when everyone in your community is either a member of your immediate family or at least someone you know by sight, but less easy when communities get bigger than this. So it's useful to have a shared collection of stuff that you and your kind know about, and that outsiders don't. Now there's not much point in this stuff being universal real-world stuff like "the sky is blue", "rain is wet", and stuff like that, as that doesn't help. So it's positively a benefit to have a collection of stories that are a bit out of the ordinary, say about burning bushes, parting of seas, guys coming back from the dead, yadda yadda yadda. If some of these myths are of the Just-So Story variety that seem to explain natural phenomena like the sun coming up in the morning, periodic flooding, locust infestation, etc. etc., well then so much the better. Add to that the evolutionary benefit of believing things your parents tell you - like "cliffs are dangerous", "fire is dangerous", "lions are dangerous" - without insisting on testing it out for yourself, add several thousand years, mix well, and hey presto, organised religion.

Anyway, the Deal Or No Deal connection is that I watched a few new-ish episodes after not having seen ths show at all for a couple of years, and noticed a few changes. Firstly, Noel Edmonds' hair and beard combo has undegone a radical transformation from a greyish bouffant and goatee combo back then to a frankly terrifying dark brown full beard and yellow-ish (but still fairly bouffant) hairdo combo now, courtesy of (I assume) a large amount of Just for Men hair dye and beard treatment. More importantly, as far as my theory goes anyway, the language used within the game has mutated into a jargon probably incomprehensible to those who don't watch the show regularly. The jokey "West Wing", "East Wing", "pilgrims" stuff was there before, but now we've got all manner of other stuff like "the death box" (number 22), "the guv'nor" (an offer of £26,000), "the power 5" (the top 5 red amounts), "5-box" (the penultimate banker's offer, made when 5 boxes remain), and many more that probably passed me by because I simply didn't understand them. Add to this the constant stream of bullshit about "strategy" (satirised by Charlie Brooker here), convoluted explanations from the players about their reasons for choosing a particular box (birthdays, usually), and liberal application of the gambler's fallacy among assorted other irrationality and I think you have quite a close model of how religions develop and eventually ossify into arcane and incomprehensible ritual accessible only to the chosen. Admittedly the adherents of Deal Or No Deal haven't started killing each other in some dispute about dogma yet, but I expect it's only a matter of time.

It should also be noted, while we're speculating about the depths of irrationality to which people might sink, that Noel Edmonds is a bit of a devotee of the splendidly fluffy and inane self-help psychobabble known as Cosmic Ordering, and has written a book on the subject. Someone who has also jumped on this particular bandwagon is astrologer Jonathan Cainer, whose televisual ambushing at the hands of The Amazing Randi and Fry & Laurie back in the early 1990s really never gets old.

levon knows I'm miserable now

Here's a brief and slightly belated tribute to Levon Helm, who died last Thursday. I've mentioned my great love for The Band here before, and their first album Music From Big Pink in particular, and Helm (the only non-Canadian in the line-up - he was from Arkansas) was a vital and integral part of their sound as vocalist and drummer and (as pretty much every member of the band was) multi-instrumentalist. One of the great things about The Band is that they had three "lead" vocalists (if you disregard the couple of songs Robbie Robertson sang on) in Helm, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel, all three of whom are now dead, as it happens. I think Helm was my favourite singer of the three, though, featuring on classic songs like Rag Mama Rag, Up On Cripple Creek and The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.

Both of those linked clips are from Martin Scorsese's classic 1978 documentary - if you will, rockumentary - The Last Waltz, which you should snap up ludicrously cheaply on DVD right now. Album-wise you will certainly want the first two albums Music From Big Pink and The Band, and I retain a bit of a soft spot for their underrated third album Stage Fright as well. The 1972 live album Rock Of Ages and the ramshackle collection of Bob Dylan collaborations The Basement Tapes are well worth a listen too.

Here's a couple of other Band clips: a bracingly brisk run-through of The Weight (with Helm singing the first couple of verses) from the 1970 Festival Express tour, and a studio run-through of King Harvest (Has Surely Come), also from 1970.

Drummer/vocalist is a job few people have managed to do successfully, as Levon Helm did. There are a few obvious examples like Phil Collins and Don Henley, and there are drummers who sang the occasional lead vocal like Roger Taylor, Ringo Starr and Micky Dolenz. Karen Carpenter started out as a drummer, too, but eventually moved to the front of the stage (as did Collins and Henley). The only other example that springs to mind is Andy Sturmer of the mighty Jellyfish, who used to play a mini-kit while standing up at the front of the stage.

Levon Helm also gave his name to one of Elton John's more interesting songs, and also Elton and partner David Furnish's son.

the last book I read

Invisible by Paul Auster.

It's 1967, and aspiring poet Adam Walker is in the middle of his studies at Columbia University, partly to further his poetical ambitions and hone his creative and literary skills, but also to avoid the draft. At an academic drinks party he meets the enigmatic European Rudolf Born and his girlfriend Margot. Their lives bcome intertwined: Born offers to give Adam creative control of a new literary magazine he is proposing setting up and funding, and Adam and Margot start a clandestine affair.

Not clandestine enough, as it turns out, as Born rumbles them and confronts Adam with his knowledge. He seems pretty relaxed about the whole thing, though, so it's something of a surprise when Adam and Born are confronted by a mugger on the corner of Riverside Drive and West 112th Street and Born whips out a switchblade and stabs their assailant in the stomach, fatally it later transpires.

Needless to say the magazine deal is off after all this, and Adam, after receiving some threatening communications from Born, delays reporting the incident to the police until after Born has fled back to Europe, something that causes him years of guilt.

Forty years of guilt, as it turns out, as we then zoom forward to 2007 to discover that the first part of the novel is the contents of the first section of a manuscript that Walker, now dying of leukaemia, has sent his old college friend Jim for a literary evaluation. After an exchange of letters between the two, part two soon follows. Far from being a continuation of the business described in the first chapter (I'm struggling hard to avoid a series of The Born Identity puns here) this is a description of Adam's last summer in the USA after graduating and before leaving for Paris to take up a scholarship there. Most of the summer was spent sharing an apartment with his sister, Gwyn. Adam and Gwyn became very close as children after the death of their younger brother, and in their early teens shared a night of guilt-free sexual experimentation very similar to the hypothetical one described here and here. Well, the temptation of flat-sharing proves too much for the flimsy taboo of incest to withstand, and they're soon fucking like crazed weasels.

Adam and Jim arrange to meet, but Adam dies before this can happen, leaving Jim with the skeletal notes of the third section of the book. This describes Adam's time in Paris, where he by chance runs in to Margot and Born again, seperately this time, rekindling his relationship with Margot but also hatching a plan to foil Born's plans to marry wealthy widow Hélène Juin, by the fairly simple method of befriending Hélène and her daughter Cécile and then spilling the beans about the stabby New York incident.

We then discover that Jim has been in contact with Adam's sister Gwyn, and that she has read the first three sections of the book, and agreed to their publication as long as all the names and locations are changed. Furthermore we learn that what we've just read is the result of that process, so in other words Adam Walker wasn't really called Adam Walker, he didn't really go to Columbia, etc. etc. We also learn that Gwyn categorically denies ever having indulged in any incesty shenanigans with her brother (hence her desire for anonymity).

Jim has also been in touch with Cécile Juin, and the last section of the book is another transcription of a manuscript, this time a portion of Cécile's diary describing her last encounter with Born, now an elderly and overweight recluse living on a remote Caribbean island. Having agreed, after an exchange of letters, to travel to the island to meet Born, Cécile is somewhat taken aback when Born first asks her to marry him, and subsequently (after she turns him down) to help him write a memoir of his life, a life with some murky secrets including clandestine work for the French government and just the possibility of having been a double agent for the Russians as well. Not thrilled by a lengthy stay on a remote island taking Born's dictation (ooer), Cécile refuses, and leaves. The end.

It's easy to see how this novel would be knuckle-chewingly infuriating to some - we never get much in the way of clear resolution of any of the plot points, and there are many: did Born really murder the mugger in New York? Did Adam and Gwyn really have a stolen summer of transgressive happy sexy joy joy time, or was the whole thing a fantasy of Adam's? And was Born really (as he suggests) responsible for the car crash that left Cécile's father in a vegetative coma? There are so many different layers of narrative from so many different people (Adam, Jim, Gwyn, Cécile) that it's impossible to know what's "real" from what's not. Presumably this is Auster's point, though: none of it is actually real, after all, it's just a novel. And there's absolutely no reason why we should care about, or feel slightly cheated by, the revelation that (for instance) "Adam Walker" wasn't the "Adam Walker" character's "real" name, because he was never real to begin with.

You have to be good to get away with all of this metafictional rug-pulling without it just being annoying, and it's remarkable how compulsively readable this is, even while you know you're just being fucked with at various points. At Swim-Two-Birds, Christy Malry's Own Double-Entry, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, Kleinzeit, Invisible Cities and Slow Man pulled off similar tricks. Inevitably these sort of shenangians tend to polarise the critics: some loved it, some didn't, and some wrote lengthy hatchet jobs dismissing Auster's entire body of work. My opinion, for what it's worth, is that I enjoyed it, more so than the only other Auster book I've read, The New York Trilogy, which was much more explicitly arch and experimental.

I should also add that I picked up my almost-new paperback copy of Invisible a couple of weeks ago for the princely sum of ten pence in a charity bookshop in Chepstow. I conclude two things from this - firstly that whoever owned it first was less impressed than me by the metafictional playfulness, and secondly that I frickin' love charity bookshops. At a cover price of £8.99 that's a whopping 98.9% discount, and a spare £8.89 for me to spend on crack and whores.

Lastly, mention of Invisible Cities prompts me to the observation that this is the first book in this now quite lengthy series whose title is a part of the title of another book in the series. The only other pair that might qualify would be G. and Good As Gold, and you'd have to disregard the full stop which is an integral part of G.'s title, so I don't think it really works.